1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data communication apparatus and method of data communication, and specifically relates to a data communication apparatus and data communication method capable of transmitting data over a plurality of communication lines such as internet line and the like in addition to a telephone line.
2. Description of the Related Art
In conventional data communication apparatuses such as facsimile apparatuses and the like, communicant destinations (transmission destinations) and their address data are recorded in memory beforehand. Then, according to the known art, during actual transmission, the data transmission is executed to the address destination recorded in memory only for the specified transmission destination.
In such data communication apparatuses capable of recording communicant information, however, the address data of communicant destinations must be recorded by manual input one at a time, and this recording operation is a major burden for the operator.
Accordingly, in order to reduce the labor of the operator required for the recording operation, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 10-98604, for example, discloses art allowing automated recording by transmitting the information of recorded transmission destinations to another data communication apparatus.
In the art disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent No. 10-98604, however, information of a transmission destination recorded in memory of a specific data communication apparatus is simply transmitted to a single other data communication apparatus. For this reason, the transmitted information may be communicant destination information that is unnecessary to the other data communication apparatus, and the necessary communicant destination information may be omitted. In such instances, it becomes necessary to perform an operation to correct (add or delete) the new communicant destination information.
Particularly in recent years the upgrading of the communication infrastructure has led to the popularization of data communication apparatuses capable of using not only public telephone lines, but also a plurality of lines including internet lines and LAN lines and the like. A representative data communication apparatus is, for example, the internet facsimile apparatus. In such data communication apparatuses, the correction operation required after the transmission of the communication destination information has become remarkably problematic, greatly increasing the burden on the operator.
That is, in data communication apparatuses capable of using a plurality of lines, the data communication apparatus itself will have a plurality of addresses corresponding to the plurality of lines. For this reason, a plurality of address data for a single communicant destination (transmission destination) must be recorded together in memory.
Accordingly, the amount of communicant destination data recorded in memory greatly increases compared to when data of a single address are recorded. Similarly, the operation of recording communicant address data one at a time performed by the operator is markedly increased.